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Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves,
about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships
according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains
have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations.
Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under
the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts.
Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond
to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says
the third, to knock them out of their heads; and -- existing reality will collapse.

These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy,
which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced
by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness
and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim
of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing
how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German
middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the
wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit
the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy
and muddled German nation.

Once upon a time a valiant fellow had the idea that men were drowned in water only
because they were possessed with the idea of gravity. If they were to knock this notion
out of their heads, say by stating it to be a superstition, a religious concept, they
would be sublimely proof against any danger from water. His whole life long he fought
against the illusion of gravity, of whose harmful results all statistic brought him
new and manifold evidence. This valiant fellow was the type of the new revolutionary
philosophers in Germany.

As we hear from German ideologists, Germany has in the last few years gone through
an unparalleled revolution. The decomposition of the Hegelian philosophy, which began
with Strauss, has developed into a universal ferment into which all the "powers of
the past" are swept. In the general chaos mighty empires have arisen only to meet
with immediate doom, heroes have emerged momentarily only to be hurled back into obscurity
by bolder and stronger rivals. It was a revolution beside which the French Revolution
was child's play, a world struggle beside which the struggles of the Diadochi [successors
of Alexander the Great] appear insignificant. Principles ousted one another, heroes
of the mind overthrew each other with unheard-of rapidity, and in the three years
1842-45 more of the past was swept away in Germany than at other times in three centuries.

All this is supposed to have taken place in the realm of pure thought.

Certainly it is an interesting event we are dealing with: the putrescence of the absolute
spirit. When the last spark of its life had failed, the various components of this
caput mortuum began to decompose, entered into new combinations and formed new substances.
The industrialists of philosophy, who till then had lived on the exploitation of the
absolute spirit, now seized upon the new combinations. Each with all possible zeal
set about retailing his apportioned share. This naturally gave rise to competition,
which, to start with, was carried on in moderately staid bourgeois fashion. Later
when the German market was glutted, and the commodity in spite of all efforts found
no response in the world market, the business was spoiled in the usual German manner
by fabricated and fictitious production, deterioration in quality, adulteration of
the raw materials, falsification of labels, fictitious purchases, bill-jobbing and
a credit system devoid of any real basis. The competition turned into a bitter struggle,
which is now being extolled and interpreted to us as a revolution of world significance,
the begetter of the most prodigious results and achievements.

If we wish to rate at its true value this philosophic charlatanry, which awakens even
in the breast of the honest German citizen a glow of national pride, if we wish to
bring out clearly the pettiness, the parochial narrowness of this whole Young-Hegelian
movement and in particular the tragicomic contrast between the illusions of these
heroes about their achievements and the actual achievements themselves, we must look
at the whole spectacle from a standpoint beyond the frontiers of Germany.

German criticism has, right up to its latest efforts, never quitted the realm of philosophy.
Far from examining its general philosophic premises, the whole body of its inquiries
has actually sprung from the soil of a definite philosophical system, that of Hegel.
Not only in their answers but in their very questions there was a mystification. This
dependence on Hegel is the reason why not one of these modern critics has even attempted
a comprehensive criticism of the Hegelian system, however much each professes to have
advanced beyond Hegel. Their polemics against Hegel and against one another are confined
to this — each extracts one side of the Hegelian system and turns this against the
whole system as well as against the sides extracted by the others. To begin with they
extracted pure unfalsified Hegelian categories such as "substance" and "self-consciousness",
later they desecrated these categories with more secular names such as species "the
Unique", "Man", etc.

The entire body of German philosophical criticism from Strauss to Stirner is confined
to criticism of religious conceptions. The critics started from real religion and
actual theology. What religious consciousness and a religious conception really meant
was determined variously as they went along. Their advance consisted in subsuming
the allegedly dominant metaphysical, political, juridical, moral and other conceptions
under the class of religious or theological conceptions; and similarly in pronouncing
political, juridical, moral consciousness as religious or theological, and the political,
juridical, moral man — "man" in the last resort — as religious. The dominance of religion
was taken for granted. Gradually every dominant relationship was pronounced a religious
relationship and transformed into a cult, a cult of law, a cult of the State, etc.
On all sides it was only a question of dogmas and belief in dogmas. The world was
sanctified to an ever-increasing extent till at last our venerable Saint Max was able
to canonise it en bloc and thus dispose of it once for all.

The Old Hegelians had comprehended everything as soon as it was reduced to an Hegelian
logical category. The Young Hegelians criticised everything by attributing to it religious
conceptions or by pronouncing it a theological matter. The Young Hegelians are in
agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts,
of a universal principle in the existing world. Only, the one party attacks this dominion
as usurpation. while the other extols it as legitimate.

Since the Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products
of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains
of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society) it
is evident that the Young Hegelians have to fight only against these illusions of
consciousness. Since, according to their fantasy, the relationships of men, all their
doings, their chains and their limitations are products of their consciousness, the
Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present
consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus of removing
their limitations. This demand to change consciousness amounts to a demand to interpret
reality in another way, i.e. to recognise it by means of another interpretation. The
Young-Hegelian ideologists, in spite of their allegedly "world-shattering" statements,
are the staunchest conservatives. The most recent of them have found the correct expression
for their activity when they declare they are only fighting against "phrases". They
forget, however, that to these phrases they themselves are only opposing other phrases,
and that they are in no way combating the real existing world when they are merely
combating the phrases of this world. The only results which this philosophic criticism
could achieve were a few (and at that thoroughly one-sided) elucidations of Christianity
from the point of view of religious history; all the rest of their assertions are
only further embellishments of their claim to have furnished, in these unimportant
elucidations, discoveries of universal importance.

It has not occurred to any one of these philosophers to inquire into the connection
of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their
own material surroundings.

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises
from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals,
their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which
they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can
thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human
individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of
these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course,
we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural
conditions in which man finds himself — geological, hydrographical, climatic and so
on. The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their
modification in the course of history through the action of men.

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else
you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as
they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their
physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly
producing their actual material life.

The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the
nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce.
This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the
physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of
these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life
on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore,
coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.
The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their
production.

This production only makes its appearance with the increase of population. In its
turn this presupposes the intercourse [Verkehr] of individuals with one another. The
form of this intercourse is again determined by production.

The relations of different nations among themselves depend upon the extent to which
each has developed its productive forces, the division of labour and internal intercourse.
This statement is generally recognised. But not only the relation of one nation to
others, but also the whole internal structure of the nation itself depends on the
stage of development reached by its production and its internal and external intercourse.
How far the productive forces of a nation are developed is shown most manifestly by
the degree to which the division of labour has been carried. Each new productive force,
insofar as it is not merely a quantitative extension of productive forces already
known (for instance the bringing into cultivation of fresh land), causes a further
development of the division of labour.

The division of labour inside a nation leads at first to the separation of industrial
and commercial from agricultural labour, and hence to the separation of town and country
and to the conflict of their interests. Its further development leads to the separation
of commercial from industrial labour. At the same time through the division of labour
inside these various branches there develop various divisions among the individuals
co-operating in definite kinds of labour. The relative position of these individual
groups is determined by the methods employed in agriculture, industry and commerce
(patriarchalism, slavery, estates, classes). These same conditions are to be seen
(given a more developed intercourse) in the relations of different nations to one
another.

The various stages of development in the division of labour are just so many different
forms of ownership, i.e. the existing stage in the division of labour determines also
the relations of individuals to one another with reference to the material, instrument,
and product of labour.

The first form of ownership is tribal [Stammeigentum]1 ownership. It corresponds to
the undeveloped stage of production, at which a people lives by hunting and fishing,
by the rearing of beasts or, in the highest stage, agriculture. In the latter case
it presupposes a great mass of uncultivated stretches of land. The division of labour
is at this stage still very elementary and is confined to a further extension of the
natural division of labour existing in the family. The social structure is, therefore,
limited to an extension of the family; patriarchal family chieftains, below them the
members of the tribe, finally slaves. The slavery latent in the family only develops
gradually with the increase of population, the growth of wants, and with the extension
of external relations, both of war and of barter.

The second form is the ancient communal and State ownership which proceeds especially
from the union of several tribes into a city by agreement or by conquest, and which
is still accompanied by slavery. Beside communal ownership we already find movable,
and later also immovable, private property developing, but as an abnormal form subordinate
to communal ownership. The citizens hold power over their labouring slaves only in
their community, and on this account alone, therefore, they are bound to the form
of communal ownership. It is the communal private property which compels the active
citizens to remain in this spontaneously derived form of association over against
their slaves. For this reason the whole structure of society based on this communal
ownership, and with it the power of the people, decays in the same measure as, in
particular, immovable private property evolves. The division of labour is already
more developed. We already find the antagonism of town and country; later the antagonism
between those states which represent town interests and those which represent country
interests, and inside the towns themselves the antagonism between industry and maritime
commerce. The class relation between citizens and slaves is now completely developed.

With the development of private property, we find here for the first time the same
conditions which we shall find again, only on a more extensive scale, with modern
private property. On the one hand, the concentration of private property, which began
very early in Rome (as the Licinian agrarian law proves) and proceeded very rapidly
from the time of the civil wars and especially under the Emperors; on the other hand,
coupled with this, the transformation of the plebeian small peasantry into a proletariat,
which, however, owing to its intermediate position between propertied citizens and
slaves, never achieved an independent development.

The third form of ownership is feudal or estate property. If antiquity started out
from the town and its little territory, the Middle Ages started out from the country.
This different starting-point was determined by the sparseness of the population at
that time, which was scattered over a large area and which received no large increase
from the conquerors. In contrast to Greece and Rome, feudal development at the outset,
therefore, extends over a much wider territory, prepared by the Roman conquests and
the spread of agriculture at first associated with it. The last centuries of the declining
Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces;
agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died
out or been violently suspended, the rural and urban population had decreased. From
these conditions and the mode of organisation of the conquest determined by them,
feudal property developed under the influence of the Germanic military constitution.
Like tribal and communal ownership, it is based again on a community; but the directly
producing class standing over against it is not, as in the case of the ancient community,
the slaves, but the enserfed small peasantry. As soon as feudalism is fully developed,
there also arises antagonism to the towns. The hierarchical structure of land ownership,
and the armed bodies of retainers associated with it, gave the nobility power over
the serfs. This feudal organisation was, just as much as the ancient communal ownership,
an association against a subjected producing class; but the form of association and
the relation to the direct producers were different because of the different conditions
of production.

This feudal system of land ownership had its counterpart in the towns in the shape
of corporative property, the feudal organisation of trades. Here property consisted
chiefly in the labour of each individual person. The necessity for association against
the organised robber-nobility, the need for communal covered markets in an age when
the industrialist was at the same time a merchant, the growing competition of the
escaped serfs swarming into the rising towns, the feudal structure of the whole country:
these combined to bring about the guilds. The gradually accumulated small capital
of individual craftsmen and their stable numbers, as against the growing population,
evolved the relation of journeyman and apprentice, which brought into being in the
towns a hierarchy similar to that in the country.

Thus the chief form of property during the feudal epoch consisted on the one hand
of landed property with serf labour chained to it, and on the other of the labour
of the individual with small capital commanding the labour of journeymen. The organisation
of both was determined by the restricted conditions of production — the small-scale
and primitive cultivation of the land, and the craft type of industry. There was little
division of labour in the heyday of feudalism. Each country bore in itself the antithesis
of town and country; the division into estates was certainly strongly marked; but
apart from the differentiation of princes, nobility, clergy and peasants in the country,
and masters, journeymen, apprentices and soon also the rabble of casual labourers
in the towns, no division of importance took place. In agriculture it was rendered
difficult by the strip-system, beside which the cottage industry of the peasants themselves
emerged. In industry there was no division of labour at all in the individual trades
themselves, and very little between them. The separation of industry and commerce
was found already in existence in older towns; in the newer it only developed later,
when the towns entered into mutual relations.

The grouping of larger territories into feudal kingdoms was a necessity for the landed
nobility as for the towns. The organisation of the ruling class, the nobility, had,
therefore, everywhere a monarch at its head.

The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History Social Being and Social Consciousness

The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a
definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation
must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification
and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production.
The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process
of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear in their own or
other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce
materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions
and conditions independent of their will.

The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven
with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real
life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as
the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production
as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc.
of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. — real, active
men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces
and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness
can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their
actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down
as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical
life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here
we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say,
imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order
to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis
of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes
and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also,
necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable
and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology
and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance
of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material
production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence,
their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness,
but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness
taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life,
it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely
as their consciousness.

This method of approach is not devoid of premises. It starts out from the real premises
and does not abandon them for a moment. Its premises are men, not in any fantastic
isolation and rigidity, but in their actual, empirically perceptible process of development
under definite conditions. As soon as this active life-process is described, history
ceases to be a collection of dead facts as it is with the empiricists (themselves
still abstract), or an imagined activity of imagined subjects, as with the idealists.

Where speculation ends — in real life — there real, positive science begins: the representation
of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty talk
about consciousness ceases, and real knowledge has to take its place. When reality
is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of
existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing-up of the most general
results, abstractions which arise from the observation of the historical development
of men. Viewed apart from real history, these abstractions have in themselves no value
whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material,
to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe
or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history. On the contrary,
our difficulties begin only when we set about the observation and the arrangement
— the real depiction — of our historical material, whether of a past epoch or of the
present. The removal of these difficulties is governed by premises which it is quite
impossible to state here, but which only the study of the actual life-process and
the activity of the individuals of each epoch will make evident. We shall select here
some of these abstractions, which we use in contradistinction to the ideologists,
and shall illustrate them by historical examples.

Since we are dealing with the Germans, who are devoid of premises, we must begin by
stating the first premise of all human existence and, therefore, of all history, the
premise, namely, that men must be in a position to live in order to be able to "make
history". But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation,
clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of
the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself. And indeed
this is an historical act, a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as
thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled merely in order to sustain
human life. Even when the sensuous world is reduced to a minimum, to a stick as with
Saint Bruno [Bauer], it presupposes the action of producing the stick. Therefore in
any interpretation of history one has first of all to observe this fundamental fact
in all its significance and all its implications and to accord it its due importance.
It is well known that the Germans have never done this, and they have never, therefore,
had an earthly basis for history and consequently never an historian. The French and
the English, even if they have conceived the relation of this fact with so-called
history only in an extremely one-sided fashion, particularly as long as they remained
in the toils of political ideology, have nevertheless made the first attempts to give
the writing of history a materialistic basis by being the first to write histories
of civil society, of commerce and industry.

The second point is that the satisfaction of the first need (the action of satisfying,
and the instrument of satisfaction which has been acquired) leads to new needs; and
this production of new needs is the first historical act. Here we recognise immediately
the spiritual ancestry of the great historical wisdom of the Germans who, when they
run out of positive material and when they can serve up neither theological nor political
nor literary rubbish, assert that this is not history at all, but the "prehistoric
era". They do not, however, enlighten us as to how we proceed from this nonsensical
"prehistory" to history proper; although, on the other hand, in their historical speculation
they seize upon this "prehistory" with especial eagerness because they imagine themselves
safe there from interference on the part of "crude facts", and, at the same time,
because there they can give full rein to their speculative impulse and set up and
knock down hypotheses by the thousand.

The third circumstance which, from the very outset, enters into historical development,
is that men, who daily remake their own life, begin to make other men, to propagate
their kind: the relation between man and woman, parents and children, the family.
The family, which to begin with is the only social relationship, becomes later, when
increased needs create new social relations and the increased population new needs,
a subordinate one (except in Germany), and must then be treated and analysed according
to the existing empirical data, not according to "the concept of the family", as is
the custom in Germany. [1] These three aspects of social activity are not of course
to be taken as three different stages, but just as three aspects or, to make it clear
to the Germans, three "moments", which have existed simultaneously since the dawn
of history and the first men, and which still assert themselves in history today.

The production of life, both of one's own in labour and of fresh life in procreation,
now appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as
a social relationship. By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals,
no matter under what conditions, in what manner and to what end. It follows from this
that a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a
certain mode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself
a "productive force". Further, that the multitude of productive forces accessible
to men determines the nature of society, hence, that the "history of humanity" must
always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange.
But it is also clear how in Germany it is impossible to write this sort of history,
because the Germans lack not only the necessary power of comprehension and the material
but also the "evidence of their senses", for across the Rhine you cannot have any
experience of these things since history has stopped happening. Thus it is quite obvious
from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another,
which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old
as men themselves. This connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents
a "history" independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense
which in addition may hold men together.

Only now, after having considered four moments, four aspects of the primary historical
relationships, do we find that man also possesses "consciousness", but, even so, not
inherent, not "pure" consciousness. From the start the "spirit" is afflicted with
the curse of being "burdened" with matter, which here makes its appearance in the
form of agitated layers of air, sounds, in short, of language. Language is as old
as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men,
and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like
consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of intercourse with other
men. Where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter
into "relations" with anything, it does not enter into any relation at all. For the
animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation. Consciousness is, therefore,
from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all.
Consciousness is at first, of course, merely consciousness concerning the immediate
sensuous environment and consciousness of the limited connection with other persons
and things outside the individual who is growing self-conscious. At the same time
it is consciousness of nature, which first appears to men as a completely alien, all-powerful
and unassailable force, with which men's relations are purely animal and by which
they are overawed like beasts; it is thus a purely animal consciousness of nature
(natural religion) just because nature is as yet hardly modified historically. (We
see here immediately: this natural religion or this particular relation of men to
nature is determined by the form of society and vice versa. Here, as everywhere, the
identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men
to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted
relation to one another determines men's restricted relation to nature.) On the other
hand, man's consciousness of the necessity of associating with the individuals around
him is the beginning of the consciousness that he is living in society at all. This
beginning is as animal as social life itself at this stage. It is mere herd-consciousness,
and at this point man is only distinguished from sheep by the fact that with him consciousness
takes the place of instinct or that his instinct is a conscious one. This sheep-like
or tribal consciousness receives its further development and extension through increased
productivity, the increase of needs, and, what is fundamental to both of these, the
increase of population. With these there develops the division of labour, which was
originally nothing but the division of labour in the sexual act, then that division
of labour which develops spontaneously or "naturally" by virtue of natural predisposition
(e.g. physical strength), needs, accidents, etc. etc. Division of labour only becomes
truly such from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears.
(The first form of ideologists, priests, is concurrent.) From this moment onwards
consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness
of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something
real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world
and to proceed to the formation of "pure" theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.
But even if this theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc. comes into contradiction
with the existing relations, this can only occur because existing social relations
have come into contradiction with existing forces of production; this, moreover, can
also occur in a particular national sphere of relations through the appearance of
the contradiction, not within the national orbit, but between this national consciousness
and the practice of other nations, i.e. between the national and the general consciousness
of a nation (as we see it now in Germany).

Moreover, it is quite immaterial what consciousness starts to do on its own: out of
all such muck we get only the one inference that these three moments, the forces of
production, the state of society, and consciousness, can and must come into contradiction
with one another, because the division of labour implies the possibility, nay the
fact that intellectual and material activity — enjoyment and labour, production and
consumption — devolve on different individuals, and that the only possibility of their
not coming into contradiction lies in the negation in its turn of the division of
labour. It is self-evident, moreover, that "spectres", "bonds", "the higher being",
"concept", "scruple", are merely the idealistic, spiritual expression, the conception
apparently of the isolated individual, the image of very empirical fetters and limitations,
within which the mode of production of life and the form of intercourse coupled with
it move.

With the division of labour, in which all these contradictions are implicit, and which
in its turn is based on the natural division of labour in the family and the separation
of society into individual families opposed to one another, is given simultaneously
the distribution, and indeed the unequal distribution, both quantitative and qualitative,
of labour and its products, hence property: the nucleus, the first form, of which
lies in the family, where wife and children are the slaves of the husband. This latent
slavery in the family, though still very crude, is the first property, but even at
this early stage it corresponds perfectly to the definition of modern economists who
call it the power of disposing of the labour-power of others. Division of labour and
private property are, moreover, identical expressions: in the one the same thing is
affirmed with reference to activity as is affirmed in the other with reference to
the product of the activity.

Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of
the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all
individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest
does not exist merely in the imagination, as the "general interest", but first of
all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour
is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how,
as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between
the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily,
but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which
enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of
labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity,
which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman,
a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his
means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere
of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates
the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and
another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter,
fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation
of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our
control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of
the chief factors in historical development up till now. [2]

The social power, i.e., the multiplied productive force, which arises through the
co-operation of different individuals as it is determined by the division of labour,
appears to these individuals, since their co-operation is not voluntary but has come
about naturally, not as their own united power, but as an alien force existing outside
them, of the origin and goal of which they are ignorant, which they thus cannot control,
which on the contrary passes through a peculiar series of phases and stages independent
of the will and the action of man, nay even being the prime governor of these.

How otherwise could for instance property have had a history at all, have taken on
different forms, and landed property, for example, according to the different premises
given, have proceeded in France from parcellation to centralisation in the hands of
a few, in England from centralisation in the hands of a few to parcellation, as is
actually the case today? Or how does it happen that trade, which after all is nothing
more than the exchange of products of various individuals and countries, rules the
whole world through the relation of supply and demand — a relation which, as an English
economist says, hovers over the earth like the fate of the ancients, and with invisible
hand allots fortune and misfortune to men, sets up empires and overthrows empires,
causes nations to rise and to disappear — while with the abolition of the basis of
private property, with the communistic regulation of production (and, implicit in
this, the destruction of the alien relation between men and what they themselves produce),
the power of the relation of supply and demand is dissolved into nothing, and men
get exchange, production, the mode of their mutual relation, under their own control
again?

In history up to the present it is certainly an empirical fact that separate individuals
have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become
more and more enslaved under a power alien to them (a pressure which they have conceived
of as a dirty trick on the part of the so-called universal spirit, etc.), a power
which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be
the world market. But it is just as empirically established that, by the overthrow
of the existing state of society by the communist revolution (of which more below)
and the abolition of private property which is identical with it, this power, which
so baffles the German theoreticians, will be dissolved; and that then the liberation
of each single individual will be accomplished in the measure in which history becomes
transformed into world history. From the above it is clear that the real intellectual
wealth of the individual depends entirely on the wealth of his real connections. Only
then will the separate individuals be liberated from the various national and local
barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual
production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire the capacity to
enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man). All-round
dependence, this natural form of the world-historical co-operation of individuals,
will be transformed by this communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery
of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another, have till now overawed
and governed men as powers completely alien to them. Now this view can be expressed
again in speculative-idealistic, i.e. fantastic, terms as "self-generation of the
species" ("society as the subject"), and thereby the consecutive series of interrelated
individuals connected with each other can be conceived as a single individual, which
accomplishes the mystery of generating itself. It is clear here that individuals certainly
make one another, physically and mentally, but do not make themselves.

Development of the Productive Forces as a Material Premise of Communism

This "alienation" (to use a term which will be comprehensible to the philosophers)
can, of course, only be abolished given two practical premises. For it to become an
"intolerable" power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily
have rendered the great mass of humanity "propertyless", and produced, at the same
time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which
conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development.
And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies
the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local,
being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely
made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy
business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this
universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men
established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the "propertyless"
mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the
others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in
place of local ones. Without this, (i) communism could only exist as a local event;
(2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence
intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition;
and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically,
communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples "all at once" and simultaneously,
which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse
bound up with communism. Moreover, the mass of propertyless workers — the utterly
precarious position of labour — power on a mass scale cut off from capital or from
even a limited satisfaction and, therefore, no longer merely temporarily deprived
of work itself as a secure source of life — presupposes the world market through competition.
The proletariat can thus only exist world-historically, just as communism, its activity,
can only have a "world-historical" existence. World-historical existence of individuals
means existence of individuals which is directly linked up with world history.

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to
which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which
abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from
the premises now in existence.

In the main we have so far considered only one aspect of human activity, the reshaping
of nature by men. The other aspect, the reshaping of men by men .... [Intercourse
and productive power]

Origin of the state and the relation of the state to civil society. ...

Footnotes

Contradiction between Individuals and their conditions of life

1. The building of houses. With savages each family has as a matter of course its
own cave or hut like the separate family tent of the nomads. This separate domestic
economy is made only the more necessary by the further development of private property.
With the agricultural peoples a communal domestic economy is just as impossible as
a communal cultivation of the soil. A great advance was the building of towns. In
all previous periods, however, the abolition of individual economy, which is inseparable
from the abolition of private property, was impossible for the simple reason that
the material conditions governing it were not present. The setting-up of a communal
domestic economy presupposes the development of machinery, of the use of natural forces
and of many other productive forces — e.g. of water-supplies, of gas-lighting, steam-heating,
etc., the removal [of the antagonism] of town and country. Without these conditions
a communal economy would not in itself form a new productive force; lacking any material
basis and resting on a purely theoretical foundation, it would be a mere freak and
would end in nothing more than a monastic economy — What was possible can be seen
in the towns brought about by condensation and the erection of communal buildings
for various definite purposes (prisons, barracks, etc.). That the abolition of individual
economy is inseparable from the abolition of the family is self-evident.

2. [This paragraph appears as a marginal note in the manuscript — Ed.] And out of
this very contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community
the latter takes an independent form as the State, divorced from the real interests
of individual and community, and at the same time as an illusory communal life, always
based, however, on the real ties existing in every family and tribal conglomeration
— such as flesh and blood, language, division of labour on a larger scale, and other
interests - and especially, as we shall enlarge upon later, on the classes, already
determined by the division of labour, which in every such mass of men separate out,
and of which one dominates all the others. It follows from this that all struggles
within the State, the struggle between democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy, the struggle
for the franchise, etc., etc., are merely the illusory forms in which the real struggles
of the different classes are fought out among one another (of this the German theoreticians
have not the faintest inkling, although they have received a sufficient introduction
to the subject in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and Die heilige Familie). Further,
it follows that every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination,
as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society
in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political
power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest, which in
the first moment it is forced to do. Just because individuals seek only their particular
interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest (in fact the
general is the illusory form of communal life), the latter will be imposed on them
as an interest "alien" to them, and "independent" of them as in its turn a particular,
peculiar "general" interest; or they themselves must remain within this discord, as
in democracy. On the other hind, too, the practical struggle of these particular interests,
which constantly really run counter to the communal and illusory communal interests,
makes practical intervention and control necessary through the illusory "general"
interest in the form of the State.